Science Fiction Studies

# 8 = Volume 3, Part 1 = March 1976

Gale E. Christianson

Kepler's Somnium: Science Fiction and the
Renaissance Scientist

In 1634, four years after his death,
the most provocative and innovative of Johannes Kepler’s works was published
by his son Ludwig Kepler, then a candidate for the doctorate in medicine. In one
form or another, the manuscript had been the elder Kepler’s constant companion
since his student days at Tübingen University where his introduction to the
heliocentric system, revived from the ancient Greeks by the Polish astronomer
Nicholas Copernicus, had prompted Kepler to devote one of his required
dissertations to the question: "How would the phenomena occurring in the
heavens appear to an observer stationed on the moon?" The theses propounded
by Kepler at Tübingen in 1593 contained, in the words of his German biographer
Max Caspar, "the first germ of a work which we shall come to know as the
last of the books he published," the Somnium or Dream.1

It had been Kepler’s intent to
personally supervise the publication of his manuscript and, at the time of his
sudden death in 1630, six pages of the document were in type. Jacob Bartsch,
Kepler’s son-in-law, undertook the task of completing publication but he, too,
died suddenly before it was finished. The project might well have been abandoned
at this point had not Kepler left his widow in dire financial straits. In an
attempt to assist his mother during this economic crisis, son Ludwig brought the
thin volume to press in 1634. In accordance with the medieval-classical
tradition—broken only by Kepler’s contemporary Galileo, who occasionally
published in the vernacular—the original edition was in Latin. Over two
centuries passed before a second Latin edition was published in 1870 in volume
eight of the Opera Omnia, a collection of Kepler’s works edited by
Christian Frisch. This was followed in 1898 by a rather poor and quite obscure
German paraphrase under the title Kepler’s Traum Von Mond by Ludwig
Gunther. Except for these two limited editions and a few surviving copies of the
original printing, a seminal work in science fiction remained a literary
curiosity for over three centuries, read only by those few authors with a strong
interest in the new genre and possessed of the classical background required to
read the work in its original Latin.

It is difficult to appreciate to any
degree this last work of a great theoretician and scientist without knowing
something of the circumstances surrounding its authorship, a task which spanned
some thirty-seven years. For the time in which he lived Kepler’s lunar
exploration is a truly remarkable and revolutionary work, and in the view of
historian Lewis Mumford must be appreciated for "the audacity of the
concept" as well as for its intrinsic merit as a pioneering work of science
fiction.2

There is little, if anything, in the
background and early childhood of Johannes Kepler to suggest that this son of a ne’er-do-well mercenary of the Duke of Alba and an innkeeper’s daughter, who
was nearly burned at the stake as a witch, would become a central figure in the seventeenth-century scientific revolution in astronomy. Kepler was born and
spent his childhood in Weil-der-Stadt, a small Swabian village located in
southwestern Germany. He lived in the crowded cottage home of his paternal
grandfather, Sebaldus Kepler, along with aunts, uncles and numerous brothers and
sisters—the latter of whom biographer Arthur Koestler collectively refers to
as "this misshapen progeny."3

Through some favorable natural
phenomena, not yet completely understood by modern science, Johannes was endowed
at birth with the gift of genius while the rest of his brothers and sisters
suffered from severe mental and physical handicaps. Kepler, himself, was not
entirely immune to the family curse of physical infirmity, for he was
bow-legged, frequently covered with large boils, and suffered from congenital
myopia and multiple vision. The latter affliction must have been particularly
distressing to one whose love of the heavens defined his career. Johannes’
special intellectual endowment was apparent from an early age however, and
fortunately those responsible for his education wanted the gift to be as fully
developed as possible. Consequently, Kepler was enrolled at Tübingen
University, and it was there that the first seeds of the Somnium,
published some forty years later, were sown.

Kepler was an excellent student in all
fields of study including theology, but he worked most diligently and happily on
astronomical questions. It was his good fortune to matriculate while Michael
Maestlin, one of the most learned and esteemed astronomers of the time, was a
member of the Tübingen faculty. In deference to the teachings of Martin Luther
and Phillip Melanchton, Luther’s advisor on scientific matters, Maestlin, at
least in his public lectures, advocated the geocentric system of planetary
motion as described by the second century Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy in
his influential treatise the Almagest.4 Copernican theory, even when
taught on the speculative basis permitted by the Roman Catholic Church until
Galileo’s trial in 1633, was strictly prohibited at the outset by the
Lutherans; and among his theological colleagues Maestlin was the only advocate
of the new astronomy. Privately, however, Maestlin did discuss the heliocentric
universe, and apparently his early recognition of Kepler’s genius persuaded
Maestlin to admit his student to that small circle of intimates who shared his
views. "In the youthful enthusiastic head of his pupil the spark ignited.
Maestlin’s considerations and repressions were alien to the young and
unencumbered Kepler who, open and dauntless, entered into disputation in favor
of the new astronomical theory."5

Kepler also learned a good deal of
practical astronomy from Maestlin, including the ancient Greek technique of
estimating elevations on the moon’s surface by measuring the shadows cast by
these protuberances. And he began to grapple with the question put at the
beginning of this paper of how the heavens would appear to an observer standing
on the moon. Kepler knew from studying Copernicus that the earth is moving very
rapidly. Yet those who inhabit the planet are unaware of this rapid movement
because they are not able to detect it through the use of their senses. Kepler
quite logically reasoned that a man standing on the moon would share an
identical experience; he could see the earth change position because he would
not be a participant in its rotation just as a moonwatcher on earth observes
lunar motion in which he does not participate. This realization and the complex
issues it raised became the basic theme of Kepler’s dissertation of 1593 and,
quite inadvertently, the generative force underlying the first work of modern
science fiction.

Had the Tübingen faculty been more
tolerant of the new astronomy, the theses presented in Kepler’s dissertation
would have been publicly debated and probably long forgotten. However when the
proposal was presented to the authorities for their approval, they vetoed the
debate. One of Kepler’s closest friends and a fellow student, Christoph Besold,
who later became a noted professor of law at Tübingen, appealed to his
professor and advisor, Vitus Müller, to permit him, rather than Kepler, to
uphold the theses in a disputation; but after considering the matter, Müller
refused. The fact that Besold requested to debate Kepler’s theses suggusts
that the authorities might have known of the close Kepler-Maestlin relationship,
and that Kepler and his friend considered it more likely that Müller and his
colleagues would reach a favorable verdict if Besold, a law student, led the
debate.

Kepler was no doubt disappointed and
perhaps even somewhat bitter about the decision; yet he was also realistic
enough to know that to further protest his fate, when even his highly respected
professor of astronomy was condemned to public silence on matters Copernican,
would be foolhardy and perhaps damaging to his career. Still, there was
sufficient grit to produce a pearl. Kepler wisely decided to keep his manuscript
until the time when a more favorable climate of opinion might prevail. He also
wanted to do more research, particularly on the Greek classics, and to discover
any possible precedents in them that would make his work more palatable to the
Aristotelians.

The student dissertation of 1593 was
left untouched by its author for the next sixteen years. Meanwhile, Kepler’s
career as a mathematician-astronomer flourished. He was graduated from the
Faculty of Arts at Tübingen at the age of twenty and enrolled at the
Theological Faculty of the University to continue preparing for his chosen
vocation—that of a Lutheran clergyman. His reputation as an excellent
mathematician followed him however; and the Tübingen Senate offered Kepler the
position of teacher of mathematics and astronomy in Gratz, the sleepy capital of
the Austrian province of Styria. Fearing himself unworthy of such a post, Kepler
reluctantly accepted the offer only after considerable coaxing: his plans for a
career in theology were permanently abandoned. The choice proved a good one; the
young mathematician became a respected teacher and he apparently enjoyed his new
surroundings, for Kepler remained in Gratz until January of 1600. The rather
obscure town provided few distractions from scholarly pursuits, and, since his
classes were small, Kepler had considerable free time to devote to mathematics
and astronomy.

At the age of twenty-five he published
his first book, the Mysterium Cosmographicum, which is a brilliant if
highly mystical and error-prone amalgam of Aristotelian and Copernican
cosmology.6 The work attracted the attention of the great Danish
astronomer, Tycho Brahe, who was deeply impressed by Kepler’s synthesis of the
old and new astronomy.7 This favorable impression ultimately led
Brahe to offer Kepler a position as his assistant after the Dane was appointed
Imperial Mathematician by the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II.

Kepler worked with Brahe from early
1600 until the latter’s death in November 1601, after which Kepler succeeded
to the post of his teacher. Equally important is the fact that after a squabble
with Tycho’s heirs, Kepler inherited the astronomer’s observational data,
unparalleled for its accuracy, on the oppositions of Mars between 1580 and 1600.
It was through the mathematical analysis of Brahe’s observations that Kepler
arrived at his famous law of ellipses in 1605. The conclusions derived from this
law provided the basis for his most important scientific work, Astronomia
Nova, published in 1609, the same year in which his interest in the
forgotten dissertation of his student days was rekindled.

In his capacity as Imperial
Mathematician Kepler resided in Prague, then the capital of the Holy Roman
Empire. During the summer of 1609, he became involved in a series of long
conversations with his friend and ecclesiastical advisor to Emperor Rudolph,
Wackher von Wackenfels. Rudolph had asked Kepler his views regarding the
patterns of light and shadows appearing on the lunar surface: the emperor had
personally concluded that they are formed by the reflection off the moon of
major land masses located on the earth. In effect, Rudolph was advocating a
somewhat modified version of the Aristotelian position and he wanted to know if
Kepler agreed with him.

Kepler, of course, did not agree with
his patron because as far back as his student days he had known that the shadows
on the moon were caused by mountains or other natural outcroppings. It was a
conclusion reinforced by years of additional study and observation both on his
own and under Tycho’s tutelage. While not an expert on the matter himself,
Wackher was interested in Kepler’s views and encouraged his friend to publish
them. Kepler’s lifelong intrigue with lunar geography combined with Wackher’s
interest resulted in the composition of the Somnium, a greatly modified version
of his student dissertation.8

There can be little, if any, doubt that
Kepler selected the framework of the Dream to satisfy two major demands: first,
fewer objections could be raised among the ranks of those still within the
Aristotelian orbit by passing off this Copernican treatise as a figment of an
idle slumberer’s uncontrollable imagination; and secondly, it enabled Kepler
to introduce a mythical agent or power capable of transporting humans to the
lunar surface. In fact to the cursory reader, Kepler must have appeared more
mythographer than speculative scientist, and this is the very impression the
author intended.9

The Somnium begins like a
classical legend and relates the author’s "dream" about the
adventures of a young man, Duracotus, a native of an island called
"Thule" by the ancients, Iceland by seventeenth-century Europeans.
Duracotus’ father, a fisherman by trade, died at the extremely advanced age of
150, but the child was still too young to have any recollection of him.
Fiolxhilde, the mother, is a "wise woman," who supports both her son
and herself by gathering herbs which are then cooked, stuffed in little bags of
goatskin, and sold at a nearby port to sailors. The bags supposedly harbor
mysterious lucky charms and the healing powers required by seamen on the long
and always dangerous voyages across the north Atlantic. One day, out of
curiosity," Duracotus cut open one of the bags his mother intended to sell
to a ship’s captain, scattering its contents on the ground. In a fit of anger
Fiolxhilde’s temper got the best of her and she sold her son to the captain in
place of the lost herbs.

The following day, the captain set sail
for Norway but he stopped in Denmark to deliver a letter from a bishop in
Iceland to the astronomer Tycho Brahe, who then resided on the island of Hveen
in the Sund between Copenhagen and Elsinore Castle. Duracotus became quite ill
during the voyage (apparently he carried no bag of his mother’s charms), and
he was put ashore when Tycho’s letter was delivered. The astronomer questioned
the boy at some length, considered him to be quite intelligent, and undertook to
train him in the science of astronomy. Duracotus’ response is enthusiastic:
"I was delighted beyond measure by the astronomical activities, for Brahe
and his students watched the moon and the stars all night with marvelous
instruments."10

After spending five years in Tycho’s
company Duracotus took his master’s leave and sailed for home. He found
Fiolxhilde much as she was when he left, except that the old woman had suffered
terribly as a result of her impetuosity and was overjoyed to see her son alive
and well. A number of long discussions ensued during which Fiolxhilde expressed
happiness over Duracotus’ acquaintance with the new science of the stars. She
confesses to her own special knowledge of the heavens and the fact that her
teacher is none other than the "Daemon of Lavania"—the spirit of the
moon. "Most of the things which you saw with your own eyes or learned by
hearsay or absorbed from books, he related to me as you did." The mother
then reveals her ultimate secret: it is possible, with the assistance of the
Daemon, to travel to Lavania and, quite predictably, she asks her son to
accompany her on just such a lunar voyage. Duracotus consents and "as soon
as the sun set below the horizon, and was in conjunction with the planet Saturn
in the sign of the Bull, Fiolxhilde summoned the Daemon and seated herself next
to her son who covered their heads with a blanket. Within a few moments the
journey of "fifty thousand German miles" had begun, up through the
ethereal regions to the moon.

Up to this point there is little which
separates the Somnium from a long literary tradition rooted in the imagination
of the ancient Greeks. After his rebuff at the hands of the Tübingen faculty
Kepler had purchased a copy of Lucian’s satirical work on lunar exploration
facetiously titled, A True Story. From a scientific point of view the
work made no sense: Lucian’s voyage to the moon begins in a whirlwind and
concludes by poking fun at the society of his day through a chronicle of
"hilarious discussions on the moon." The flight of Duracotus and
Fiolxhilde is also the result of supernatural forces that are no less mystical
than the whirlwind conjured up by Lucian.

A second, and more important source of
inspiration for Kepler’s moon voyage was Plutarch’s The Face on the Moon,
which Kepler read in 1595. It is a symposium of Greek scientific thought that
includes the views of Hipparchus, Aristotle, and Aristarchus of Samos. Extensive
speculation on the lunar environment as a possible home for life is presented;
and Plutarch even relates the story of a mythical traveler—a Greek Duracotus—who
sails to an island whose residents have knowledge of the passage to the moon.12
Kepler now had the classical precedent he lacked during his student days: he
even hoped to publish translations both of Lucian’s and Plutarch’s work with
the Somnium to show his debt to these classical writers, and hopefully
blunt potential criticism of his own moon voyage.13 It was a task he
did not complete.

While Kepler’s method of flight to
the moon is not markedly different from that outlined by Lucian, and although
much of his inspiration for lunar exploration is undeniably Plutarchian, the
Somnium represents a sharp break with classical tradition; the first intimation
of which occurs during the voyage itself. We are informed that the flight of
four hours is "most difficult and fraught with the greatest danger to
life." Only those who are slender of body are acceptable, thus ruling out
most German males whose general corpulence was apparently distasteful to the
slender Kepler. In jest Kepler carried the matter further by pointing out the
Daemon’s preference for "dried-up old women, experienced from an early
age in riding he-goats at night or forked sticks or threadbare cloaks." It
was to prove a most costly joke for, as we shall see, it later backfired on its
author whose own mother was accused of practicing witchcraft by superstitious
neighbors and nearly burned at the stake by the authorities.

The take-off for the moon hits the traveler
as a severe shock, "for he is hurled just as though he had been shot aloft
by gunpowder to sail over mountains and seas." In order to counteract what
Isaac Newton would later define as the force of gravity, the moon voyagers are
put to sleep with the aid of opiates and their limbs are arranged in such a way
that their bodies will not be torn apart by the force of acceleration.14
Since breathing is inhibited by the swift passage of extremely cold air through
the nostrils, damp sponges are applied to the face. Within a short time the
speed of flight becomes so great that the body involuntarily rolls itself up
into a ball like an endangered spider and "we are carried along almost
entirely by our will alone, so that finally the bodily mass proceeds toward its
destination of its own accord:" Kepler had introduced the concept of
"inertia" to the physical sciences and had extended its operation into
the heavens.

Kepler anticipates another major
obstacle to the moon voyager when he observes that we agreed not to begin
"until the moon begins to be eclipsed on its eastern side. Should it regain
its full light while we are still in transit, our departure becomes
futile." In other words, Kepler knew that once outsidethe
protective blanket provided by the earth’s atmosphere, humans could not
survive the resulting solar bombardment: the flight must begin at the critical
moment when the sun is behind the earth or at a point directly opposite the
point of take-off. During a lunar eclipse the earth’s shadow would provide the
tunnel of darkness required to protect the vulnerable moon voyager; and it is
not by accident that the maximum duration of such an eclipse is four and
one-half hours, just one-half hour more than the duration of the voyage itself.15
A further indication of Kepler’s mastery of Copernican astronomy is his
understanding that since the earth and the moon are both in motion, the shortest
route to the latter would not be the straight line advocated by such ancient
writers of mythology as Lucian, but a trajectory from earth to a point in space
where the moon and the lunar voyagers would arrive simultaneously.16

Kepler also relates that many
additional difficulties arise during the lunar voyage which are too tedious to
enumerate. We are already aware, however, that Kepler possessed a keen grasp of
the most serious obstacles to lunar flight and that even though those obstacles
were beyond solution in terms of the technological equipment of his age, he
believed it was at least theoretically possible—from a scientific point of
view—for men to reach the moon. It is this attitude that sets Kepler apart
from all the others who considered the possibility of lunar flight before him.

Upon reaching the surface of Lavania
the voyagers are weary, but soon recover sufficiently to walk about. The Daemon
immediately guides his charges to a cave in order to protect them from the
penetrating rays of the rising sun. There they meet other daemons and have the
opportunity to recuperate from the effects of their arduous journey before
beginning a reconnaissance of the moon’s geography, flora, and fauna. They are
informed by their spiritual hosts that Lavania consists of two hemispheres:
Subvolva and Privolva. Subvolva always has its Volva (Earth) above which
corresponds to the earth’s satellite, the moon, while Privolva is forever
deprived of the sight of Volva.17 Taken together, a night and a day
on Lavania are equivalent to one month on earth providing alternating two-week
periods of intense, scorching heat followed by a cold unimaginable on this
planet. The extremes of temperature in the Subvolvan hemisphere are mitigated to
some extent because of Volva’s presence which has a moderating influence on
the climate. Geographically, the surface of the moon possesses everything that
is on earth, but on a grossly exaggerated scale: the mountains reach
unbelievable heights while the fissures, valleys, and craters plunge to
precipitous depths unknown in the terrestrial realm.

Of equal interest to the student of
science fiction is Kepler’s detailed analysis of the life forms that inhabit
Lavania. His powers of scientific deduction were matched by a fertile and
realistic imagination when postulating biological conditions on the moon.
Although he was trained as an astronomer and mathematician, Kepler was too good
a scientist not to understand that the dual effects of the lunar climate and the
irregular, hostile terrain would produce plants and animals far different from
those that inhabit the earth. He rejected the temptation, which others had not,
of simply recreating a terrestrial civilization on the moon; for in Kepler’s
Lavania there are no men and women, no civilization as he knew it. Thus nearly
two centuries before Buffon, Lyell, and Darwin, Kepler had grasped the close
interrelationship between life forms and their natural environment.

Whatever is born on the moon attains a
monstrous size: growth is extremely rapid, dictating a very short life span by
terrestrial standards. Since there are no towns the "Privolvans have no
fixed abode, no established domicile." They are nomadic creatures who roam
in crowds over their entire hemisphere:

Some use their legs, which far
surpass those of our camels; some resort to wings; and some follow the
receding water in boats; or if a delay of several more days is necessary, then
they crawl into caves. Most of them are divers; all of them draw their breath
very slowly; hence under water they stay down on the bottom.

Kepler considered the natural
protection of large bodies of water and of caves as indispensable to an
environment whose temperatures far exceed those of the hottest regions on earth.
And although he does not elaborate on the subject, he suggests that the lunar
inhabitants are not the dumb animals they might at first appear to be. Their
ability to construct boats to escape the far-reaching effects of the sun
provides evidence of this.

Feeding is a nocturnal function which,
if prolonged until after sunrise, often leads to death. The skin of the
moon-dwellers, the majority of whom resemble massive serpents, is spongy and
porous and, if exposed to the full force of the sun, becomes scorched and
brittle. Food consists primarily of plants whose surface "is like
rind" and of the carcasses of the large number of creatures who die each
day. Such is the gigantic race of short-lived creatures that the historian of
literature Marjorie Hope Nicolson likened to those of the antediluvian age on
earth: lunar pterodactyls or ichthyosauri that bask for a brief moment in the
rising or setting sun, then creep forever into the impenetrable Lavanian
darkness.18

At this point the Somnium comes to a
rather abrupt and premature conclusion. Kepler informs us that, "A wind
arose with the rattle of rain. I returned to find myself and found my head
really covered with the pillow and my body with the blankets," an allusion,
no doubt, to the beginning of the moon voyage when Duracotus and Fiolxhilde
covered their heads prior to the take-off.

The actual text of the Somnium,
exclusive of the lengthy footnotes which were completed several years later and
represent the third and final stage of composition, comprises only about twenty
type-written pages. Had the work been published at this point it would have been
a slender volume indeed; but Kepler clung to his plan to publish it in
conjunction with translations of Plutarch and Lucian, and then only after it had
been circulated among his most trusted colleagues in manuscript form. As was
noted above, Kepler’s primary concern was with the opposition he might provoke
among the Aristotelians; he wanted some idea of the type of reception he could
expect.

In 1610, a few months after the text of
the Somnium was completed, Kepler received some welcome and exciting news
from Italy. His fellow scientist, Galileo Galilei, had constructed a number of
telescopes and had used them to observe celestial phenomena not visible to the
naked eye. The astounding results were published in Galileo’s revolutionary
little work, The Starry Messenger, in which the Italian astronomer
announced the discovery of sunspots, Jupiter’s four moons, countless
"new" stars, and most importantly—from Kepler’s point of view—the
mountains and craters of the moon. Here was visual confirmation of much of what
Kepler had theorized in the Somnium, and it marked the beginning of the
end of Aristotelian cosmology. Yet Kepler, unlike the overly euphoric Galileo,
was realistic enough to know that the new discoveries, no matter how
revolutionary and enlightening, would not bring about an immediate and universal
acceptance of Copernicanism, but at least the Aristotelians were clearly on the
defensive. At this point the future of the new astronomy and of the Somnium
looked almost as bright as the new stars seen for the first time through Galileo’s
telescope.

The lunar geography was probably read
privately in manuscript form for the last time in 1610. Through a rather
complicated and unfortunate series of events, Kepler lost control of a copy in
1611 and a number of individuals—many of them unknown to Kepler personally—gained
access to it, including some that the author would not have approved of. The Somnium
was written for scientists and was little understood, except on the most
superficial level, by those lacking a scientific background. Kepler suggests
that it became the subject of gossip in the tonstrinae, the forerunner to the
modern coffeehouse.19 Some of those who knew Kepler and his family,
or at least thought they did, discovered sufficient autobiographical material in
the manuscript to feed the fires of ignorance and superstition then engulfing
Germany. They equated Johannes with Duracotus and made particular note of the
similarities between Katherine Kepler, the astronomer’s mother, and Fiolxhilde,
the fictional peddler of magic charms and herbs. Especially damning was the
description of Fiolxhilde as a "wise woman" in league with celestial
spirits, nor did Kepler’s joke about the Daemon’s preference for old witches
as traveling companions help. To make matters worse, Katherine Kepler was well
known for her vile temper and generally cantankerous disposition, not to mention
the fact that the aunt who had cared for her as a child was burned at the stake
as a witch. The stage was set, charges were leveled, and in 1615 Katherine
Kepler was arrested on suspicion of practicing witchcraft. In his attempt to
evade the scorn of the Aristotelians by concealing his pro-Copernican work in
the guise of classical mythology, Kepler had inadvertently set a trap for
himself and his mother, for they had become the unwitting victims of the seventeenth-century
European witch-craze.

Johannes Kepler’s reputation as a
noted mathematician-astronomer by no means served as a guarantee that Katherine
Kepler would escape the fate of thousands of others who had already died at the
stake for their alleged complicity in what authorities envisioned as a mass
satanic conspiracy. Kepler was well aware of the seriousness of the charges and
he put all else aside to work for Katherine’s exoneration. A long, tedious,
and taxing legal battle resulted: only after five years, part of which his
mother spent in prison, was the old woman released; but the damage had been
done. Katherine Kepler died in April of 1622 from causes directly attributable
to the rigors of her imprisonment; her son had been able to do little
significant work while trying to obtain his mother’s release; and the
publication of the Somnium, at least for the present, was out of the
question. Historical circumstances, as during his student days at Tübingen in
1593, had again deprived Kepler of the opportunity to publicly air his views.
Under these conditions, could it have truly mattered to Kepler whether or not
his desire to speak out had been thwarted by a narrow-minded faculty senate
impervious to all scientific inquiry deemed anti-Aristotelian, or a group of
superstitious and half-crazed witch-hunters who had mistaken fantasy for
reality?

The tragedy of Katherine Kepler’s
long and painful ordeal weighed heavily upon her son for the remainder of his
life. He felt a deep sense of personal responsibility for the old woman’s
demise even though any reasonably objective observer could find no grounds for
culpability on his part. There was little left for Kepler but his work, and he
set out to complete a number of projects postponed by his mother’s arrest and
imprisonment. Of primary concern was a handbook of Copernican astronomy without
which fellow scientists would not know how to correlate the laws Kepler derived
from Tycho’s observations with the work of Copernicus to arrive at an operable
model of the heliocentric system.20 Another project of importance was
the planetary position predictions that would confirm the validity of Kepler’s
theory of elliptical orbits as set forth in the law of 1605. Only after
overcoming several major obstacles, which biographer Arthur Koestler likens to
the Ten Plagues of Egypt, were the Rudolphine Tables, named in honor of
Kepler’s deceased patron, brought to press.21

Meanwhile, Kepler returned to the
manuscript of the ill-fated Somnium which had been neglected since 1610.
During the last decade of his life, from 1620 to 1630, Kepler wrote the 223
footnotes to the Dream which are much longer than the text itself. It is within
these footnotes that the true scientist stands forth, for they contain the
scientific core of the lunar geography. This, the third and last stage of
composition, was undertaken as a result of Kepler’s dissatisfaction with his
scant attention to scientific detail in the earlier version of the manuscript.
The point is made by Kepler himself in a letter written to his friend, Matthias
Bernegger, dated December 4, 1623:

Two years ago, immediately after my
return to Linz I have started to work again on the astronomy of the moon, or
rather to elucidate it by remarks.... There are just as many problems as lines
in my writing, which can only be solved astronomically, physically, or
historically. But what can one do about this? The people wish that this kind of
fun, as they say, would throw itself around their neck, with cozy arms; in
playing they do not wish to wrinkle their foreheads. Therefore, I decided to
solve the problem myself, in notes ordered and numbered.22

Perhaps because of his mother’s
ordeal, coupled with the rising popularity of the new astronomy, Kepler no
longer feared or even cared about the possible consequences of publishing a work
founded on Copernican principles. The insecurity that had resulted from Kepler’s
lifelong fear of Aristotelian sanctions against his work had finally been
overcome. He had paid a price that few men of his or any other generation are
willing to pay, and then, just before the manuscript could be published, death
unexpectedly deprived him of the satisfaction of seeing his long labor in print.

In his analysis of the Somnium
Kepler’s biographer Max Caspar muses over the question: What would the Dream
have been like had Kepler written about a "moon state" the way his
contemporary, Campanella, composed a "sun state "?23 The
question arose at Kepler’s own suggestion in the same letter to Bernegger in
which he had outlined his reasons for adding footnotes to the Somnium.
Kepler asks:

Campanella wrote a City of the Sun.
What about my writing a "City of the Moon"? Would it not be
excellent to describe the cyclopic mores of our time in vivid colors, but in
doing so—to be on the safe side—to leave this earth and go to the moon? More in his
Utopia and Erasmus in his Praise of Folly ran into trouble and had
to defend themselves. Therefore let us leave the vicissitudes of politics
alone and let us remain in the pleasant, fresh green fields of philosophy.24

Caspar considers it unfortunate that
Kepler did not carry out his plan; but it is a view this writer does not share.25
No one, of course, can know the type of lunar society Kepler might have created
had he not wanted to stay out of the sticky realm of social and political
speculation: he was a genius and of all human qualities none is more
unpredictable. Still, it is difficult to believe that any work of social
criticism he might have authored could have matched Kepler’s contribution
either to scientific theory or the new literary genre, science fiction. There is
little in the historical record to show that he possessed the political insight
of either a Sir Thomas More or an Erasmus, but everything to show that he was a
scientific genius with few peers. To have turned the Somnium into a
polemic for social and political reform would have almost certainly detracted
from its real value as a unique contribution to science fiction and might have
negated its value in the field of scientific theory as well.

Kepler’s other major biographer,
Arthur Koestler, paints the picture of a man astride the crest of a great
"watershed" in Western intellectual history: on the one side is the
medieval world where science is dominated by religion and the teachings of the
ancient Greeks; on the other side is the modern world in which science finally
becomes a discipline unto itself. Kepler leans one way, then the other; but he
can never quite extricate himself from the medieval mentality of the times and
cross over onto the plain of modern thought. In many ways it is a fair
characterization, but one that fails to take sufficient account of the one work
that preoccupied Kepler off and on for some thirty-seven years and reflects the
various stages in his intellectual maturation as a scientist.

The Somnium is itself a
watershed, for it marks both the end of an old era and the beginning of a new
one. After his introductory tribute to the classicists, the modern scientist
takes command. The Daemon of Lavania is nothing less than Kepler’s own subtly
masked voice speaking with confidence and authority about the unlimited
possibilities that he, believes science holds for mankind. Gone is the
fantasy-utopian world of Lucian and Campanella; in its place is an imaginative
modern work anchored in fact and rich in rational scientific theory. If Kepler’s
little fictional work was to be overlooked by historians of science for over
three and one-half centuries, later writers of cosmic voyages in the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries did not make the same mistake.
The Somnium was known to Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and, I believe, at least
indirectly, to such contemporary writers of science fiction as Arthur C. Clarke.
Kepler opened the way for a new vision of the universe as the home of a
plurality of worlds.26 Seen from the perspective of the twentieth
century, there is no reason to dispute the assertion that Kepler’s Dream is
the fons et origo of modern science fiction.27 Fortunately,
even after the passage of three hundred and fifty years, history has a way of
correcting injustice and apportioning credit where it is due. It has not been
until the last few years that Kepler’s many works have finally been given the
attention merited by their major contributions to later scientific and
technological developments, not the least of which are twentieth-century man’s
lunar voyages.

NOTES

1. Max Caspar, Kepler, trans.
and ed. C. Doris Hellman (London and New York 1959), pp. 47-48. The full title
of Kepler’s work is Somnium seu Astronomia Lunari (Dream or Astronomy of
the Moon).

2. Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the
Machine: The Pentagon of Power (New York 1970), p. 46.

3. Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers
(London and New York 1959), p. 228.

4. Caspar, Kepler, p. 46.

5. ibid., p. 46.

6. For an excellent analysis of the Mysterium
see Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, pp. 247-267.

7. Tycho could not quite bring himself
to a full embrace of the Copernican system. He accepted the concept of
heliocentrism but retained part of the Aristotelian-Ptolemaic system by
theorizing that the planets circle the earth which in turn circles the sun.

8. Caspar, Kepler, p. 351. One
of the new twentieth-century scholars of the Somnium, Marjorie Hope
Nicolson, shares the view that much of the work was written in the summer of
1609. However, Professor Nicolson writes, "there are details which could
not possibly have been known to Kepler before the spring of 1610." She is
referring to Galileo’s publication of The Starry Messenger which made
known detailed observations of the lunar surface with the telescope. It is a
point worth keeping in mind, but one which does not significantly alter the
historical account. See her article "Kepler, the Somnium, and John
Donne," in Roots of Scientific Thought, ed. by Philip P. Wiener and
Aaron Noland (New York 1957), p. 310.

9. Translation of the Somnium
into English was first undertaken by Joseph Keith Lane, a candidate for the
Master of Arts degree at Columbia University in 1947. The thesis has not been
published. The first complete published translation in English appeared in 1965:
Kepler’s Dream trans. by Patricia Frueh Kirkwood with an interpretation
by John Lear (Berkeley and Los Angeles). A subsequent translation appeared in
1967: Kepler’s Somnium, trans. with a commentary by Edward Rosen
(Madison and London). Unless otherwise noted, I have employed the Rosen
translation when quoting from the Somnium.

10. The reader may have already
surmised that there is a substantial amount of autobiographical material in the Somnium.
For example, Kepler’s father disappeared before his son formed any permanent
impression of him; his mother was a collector of herbs; and Kepler was Brahe’s
pupil, although not at Tycho’s Uraniburg observatory on Hveen, but in Prague.

11. Lear and Kirkwood, Kepler’s
Dream, pp. 42_43.

12. Ibid., p. 45.

13. See Nicolson, "Kepler, the Somnium
and John Donne," pp. 322_323.

14. Kepler anticipated the universal
law of gravitation later formulated by Sir Isaac Newton, but he lacked both the
mathematical proof and the objectivity necessary to advance beyond the realm of
speculation. See Koestler, The Watershed, pp. 336_340 and Rosen, Kepler’s
Somnium, pp. 218_221.

20. The work is titled the Epitome
Astronomiae Copernicane, a somewhat misleading rubric for the Epitome is a
textbook of the Keplerian system rather than the Copernican system. Koestler, The
Sleepwalkers, p. 406.

21. For an account of the difficulties
encountered by Kepler see Koestler, pp. 406-411.

22. Carola Baumgardt. Johannes
Kepler: Life and Letters with an introduction by Albert Einstein (New York
1951), p. 155.

23. Caspar, Kepler, p. 351.

24. Baumgardt, Johannes Kepler: Life
and Letters, pp. 155-156.

25. Caspar, Kepler, p. 351.

26. It might be argued that this
distinction belongs to the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) whose
pantheistic teaching encompassed a plurality of worlds distributed throughout an
infinite universe. Bruno, however, was a religious mystic who soared into the
metaphysical realm unencumbered by the ballast of scientific thinking which was
Kepler’s constant companion.

27. Nicolson, Voyages to the Moon,
p. 41.

ABSTRACT

Following an account of the painful family circumstances
and risks attending the posthumous publication of Somnium in 1634, this essay
contends that the work marks the beginning of a new era. After an initial tribute to the
classicists, the modern scientist takes over. The Daemon of Lavania is nothing less than
Kepler’s own subtly masked voice, speaking with authority about the unlimited
possibilities of science. Gone is the fantasy-utopian world of Lucian and Campanella; in
its place is an imaginative modern work anchored in fact and rich in rational scientific
theory. And if Kepler’s small-scaled fictional work was overlooked by historians of
science for over 350 years, writers of cosmic voyages during the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and nineteenth centuries did not make the same mistake. The Somnium was known to
Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and, I believe, to such contemporary writers as Arthur C.
Clarke. Kepler opened the way for a new vision of the universe as a home to a plurality of
worlds; indeed, Kepler’s Dream may be seen as the fons et origo of
modern science fiction. Only in the last few years have Kepler’s writings finally
been given the attention merited by their historical importance and their contribution to
later scientific and technological developments, including twentieth-century man’s
lunar voyages.